Canon Pixma MG6820 Wireless Inkjet All-In-One Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
The mobile connectivity is good, but this inkjet AIO's ho-hum print speeds and high cost per page relegate it to light duty for casual home use. (Look for it as a dark-horse bargain on sale, though.) Read More…

What We Liked…

Deep mobile-printing features

Back access to paper path for clearing jams

Sleek design

Decent-size touch screen

What We Didn’t…

High cost per page

Slow print speeds

Output/input trays hold only 100 sheets

Lacks auto-feeder, flash-drive port

Fine text lacks finesse

Canon Pixma MG6820 Wireless Inkjet All-In-One Review

Table of Contents

Introduction & Design

The price point is a magical number. If you analyze your market well and set pricing appropriately, in theory the cost should be close to invisible to the potential buyer, because their attention becomes focused instead on what your product provides. If you set it too high, however, the demand curve drops like a sinkhole in a street with a busted water main below. That same buyer starts working comparisons against your product; and though only the price has changed, it seems to that shopper that it’s the product itself that has. What was an attractive buy at a lower price now looks less so, because of the new company it keeps.

The Canon Pixma MG6820 is as good an illustration among printers of this as any we've seen in recent years of reviewing. Canon lists this printer for a $149.99 MSRP. Some outlets were selling it for that at this November 2015 writing, and at that price, it's playing out of its league. We've also seen some resellers discount it out of the gate to around $100, however, and here it's in a more comfortable place. To illustrate this, however, we're first going to have to get to take a close look at it—both the warts and the beauty marks.

Design

All the printers in the Pixma line share a general appearance, in the same way humans in families do. Each (Pixma, not human) looks somewhat like the pillows in classic Japanese prints: rectangular, perfectly even, with the sides in both vertical and slanted planes. This holds just as true for the Pixma MG6820. In shiny black or white, it doesn't look like stodgy office gear in a home or home office, and its sleek lines are no eyesore. (Canon also offers the Pixma MG6820 in duo-tone black/silver and white/silver varieties, with the lid portion inlaid with the silver plastic.)

With a height of almost 6 inches, a width of 18 inches, and a depth of slightly over 14.5 inches, the Pixma MG6820's footprint is too large for a regular position on most desks. It also requires opening the top to access the scanning bed, which means you can't use it under a low shelf, and the front slides out to allow access to its input and output trays. The former comes with an unfolding guide flange. Once that is extended, its depth ends up increased by another 9 inches.

The unit is light, however, at about 14 pounds. It's a good printer for easily relocating around the house. Not that you'll need to do this, with its support for wireless printing from various portable devices, but it's still a useful option to have available.

As noted above, the top of the Pixma MG6820 opens, jaw-style, to reveal the flatbed scanner…

In front of that, on a slightly sloped, fixed panel, are the printer's controls. They're fairly simple, as you can tell…

Reading from left to right, there's the on/off button, and next to it, the Home button, which returns the touch screen to its top level of Copy, Scan, and Cloud icons. (Swipe left, and it brings up images for LAN Settings, Advanced Print, and Photo Print. Swipe right, and you get images for ECO Settings, Quiet Setting, and Setup.)

A bit further down and closer to the touch screen is the Back button. The touch screen itself is relatively large and readable, with a diagonal measure of just under 3.1 inches. Further right are two buttons (for black-and-white and color copies/scans), then the Stop button.

The control panel swings up and back, giving you access to the five ink cartridges…

That's four for color use, including black, and a fifth that Canon refers to as "pigment black," an extra-large cartridge for higher quality.

The printer's lower front hinges down, opening up to two thin drawers, for output and input, on top of one another, as you can see here…

Each is rated for 100 sheets of standard bond paper and can handle paper up to legal-size (8x5x14 inches).

The back contains inputs for the enclosed 58-inch power cord, and for a USB connection. (For USB, no cord is supplied, and there is no jack for wired LAN. That's available on the step-up Pixma MG7700 model.) Also back here is an access hatch for the paper path, in the event of a paper jam.

There isn't much else to see on the Pixma MG6820: no auto-feeder up top (for scanning multipage documents), no flash-drive port up front (for direct-from-printer document or photo printing), no NFC touchpoint (for wireless printing from so-equipped phones). So, let's move on to the printer's setup, and a close look at the features it offers.

Table of Contents

Canon Pixma MG6820 Wireless Inkjet All-In-One

Our Verdict:
The mobile connectivity is good, but this inkjet AIO's ho-hum print speeds and high cost per page relegate it to light duty for casual home use. (Look for it as a dark-horse bargain on sale, though.)

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